Crostini-ing the rubicon

Use Crostini to do things that, while impressive, may not quite make sense.

naturally we wanted to see exactly what was possible with Crostini, so rather than installing standard, Linux apps (GIMP, SSH, Visual

Studio Code), we thought we’d try a few more left-field bits of software.

First up was Steam, not necessarily to play games – although the Pixel Slate’s UHD 615 graphics should handle simple things like Stardew Valley – or even to stream them, though that should work too. Mostly, we just wanted to see how the VM coped with multiarchitecture shenanigans (Steam relies on a lot of 32-bit libraries), and maybe if we were lucky confuse Steam’s survey results by adding another esoteric device. Firstly, though, we need to add another repository to apt. So get thee back to the terminal and add a new repo list with:

$ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/non-free.list Then add the following line:

deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free

and save and quit. Now comes the fun part (this may be

a somewhat broad definition of fun – Ed), in which we add the i386 architecture, update package lists and finally install Steam:

$ sudo dpkg –add-architecture i386

$ sudo apt update

$ sudo apt install steam

This will install about a hundred new packages, and ask you to agree with the Steam end-user agreement. Use Tab and Space to accept it. Steam should now be available via the Chrome OS launcher. We still haven’t really installed it (the package itself just installs the installer), but that will change as soon as you launch it.

Unfortunately, we found that with GPU acceleration turned on the client became unresponsive after about a minute, although up until this point video previews in the store looked wonderfully smooth. After restarting the VM without the --enable-gpu switch, things were much more stable, and we were able to install games.

But performance was not something to be enjoyed. The introductory screens of the great indie title Hollow

Knight chugged along, and it didn’t seem worth stressing our fancy hardware by running the actual game. Still, this might’ve been peculiar to our hardware, or something that’ll be ironed out once the GPU features make it into the Beta and Stable channels. We don’t expect running titles through Proton to be a particularly enjoyable experience, but it’s nice to know that you can.

st-st-studio

Running Android apps on Linux has been possible through Anbox for some time, and many an app developer uses it for testing apps. However, being able to run Android Studio on a Chromebook presents a whole new way of working. Android apps can be run on most Chromebooks released during or after 2017, via the Play Store. Some earlier models are supported via the Beta and Dev channels too. They can also be run in Developer Mode straight from the APK file through the built-in Android runtime.

Obviously we can’t teach you to write an app in such a small space, but we can tell you how to install Android

Studio (below). Then it’s just a matter of firing up the application, building your genius app idea and taking over the world.